Review – The Killing Fields

It seems a profound shame that Sidney Schanberg has to be such a major character in Sidney Schanberg’s account of the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge in 1975. It isn’t that his story is dull; quite the contrary. Sam Waterston does a solid job portraying the journalist’s transition from arrogant foreign correspondent to human being deeply concerned about a missing friend (of course no end of twists and turns bring about the change, but that’s a story best told by the movie itself). It’s just that the story going around the reporter and his friend is so large that it can’t help but overpower one American’s crisis of conscience. This conflict is also mirrored in the music, which is often needlessly dramatic at points when a simple, straightforward re-creation of events (perhaps even with no music at all) would have sufficed. As with most movies created either by director Roland Joffe or producer David Puttnam, it’s way better than most of Hollywood’s more recent product. It’s just not a finest moment for either of them. Worth seeing